Housing Quotes

“THE ARRANGEMENTS AT the green house had become slightly peculiar, for Roen had decided to take the house back from Brigan and give it to Fire.

‘I can understand you taking it from Brigan, if that’s your pleasure,’ Fire said, standing in the small green kitchen, having this argument with Roen for the third or fourth time. ‘You’re the queen, and it’s the queen’s house, and whatever Brigan may accomplish, he’s highly unlikely ever to be queen. But Nash will have a queen someday, Roen, and the house by rights should be hers.’

‘We’ll build her something else,’ Roen said with a careless sweep of her arm.

‘This is the queen’s house,’ Fire repeated.

‘It’s my house,’ Roen said. ‘I built it, and I can give it to whomever I want, and I don’t know anyone who needs a peaceful retreat from the court more than you do, Fire—’

‘I have a retreat. I have a house of my own in the north.’

‘Three weeks away,’ Roen snorted, ‘and miserable half the year. Fire. If you’re to stay at court then I want you to have this house, for your own daily retreat. Take Brigandell and Hannadell in if you like, or send them out on their ears.’

‘Whatever woman Nash marries is already going to resent me enough—’

Roen spoke over her. ‘You are queenly, Fire, whether you see it or not. And you’d be spending most of your time here anyway if I left the house to Brigan; and I’m through with arguing. Besides, it matches your eyes.”
― Kristin Cashore, Fire

“It was the American middle class. No one's house cost more than two or three year's salary, and I doubt the spread in annual wages (except for the osteopath) exceeded more than five thousand dollars. And other than the doctor (who made house calls), the store managers, the minister, the salesman, and the banker, everyone belonged to a union. That meant they worked a forty-hour week, had the entire weekend off (plus two to four weeks' paid vacation in the summer), comprehensive medical benefits, and job security. In return for all that, the country became the most productive in the world and in our little neighborhood it meant your furnace was always working, your kids could be dropped off at the neighbors without notice, you could run next door anytime to borrow a half-dozen eggs, and the doors to all the homes were never locked -- because who would need to steal anything if they already had all that they needed?”
― Michael Francis Moore, Here Comes Trouble

“A bachelor, a studio, those were the names for that kind of apartment. Separate entrance it would say in the ads, and that meant you could have sex, unobserved.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“If it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition of man — and I think that it is, though only the wise improve their advantages — it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings without making them more costly; and the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“Competition permits the capitalist to deduct from the price of labour power that which the family earns from its own little garden or field; the workers are compelled to accept any piece wages offered to them, because otherwise they would get nothing at all, and they could not live from the products of their small-scale agriculture alone, and because, on the other hand, it is just this agriculture and landownership which chains them to the spot and prevents them from looking around for other employment.”
― Friedrich Engels, The Housing Question

“Myth: US housing market is in recovery. Fact: Big banks have been hiding their bloated home inventory, seized by virtue of home foreclosures.”
― Ziad K. Abdelnour, Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics

“At all times it is a bewildering thing to the poor weaver to see his employer removing from house to house, each one grander than the last, till he ends in building one more magnificent than all, or withdraws his money from the concern, or sells his mill, to buy an estate in the country, while all the time the weaver, who thinks he and his fellows are the real makers of this wealth, is struggling on for bread for his children, through the vicissitudes of lowered wages, short hours, fewer hands employed, etc. And when he knows trade is bad, and could understand (at least partially) that there are not buyers enough in the market to purchase the goods already made, and consequently that there is no demand for more; when he would bear and endure much without complaining, could he also see that his employers were bearing their share; he is, I say, bewildered and (to use his own word) "aggravated" to see that all goes on just as usual with the millowners. Large houses are still occupied, while spinners' and weavers' cottages stand empty, because the families that once filled them are obliged to live in rooms or cellars. Carriages still roll along the streets, concerts are still crowded by subscribers, the shops for expensive luxuries still find daily customers, while the workman loiters away his unemployed time in watching these things, and thinking of the pale, uncomplaining wife at home, and the wailing children asking in vain for enough of food--of the sinking health, of the dying life of those near and dear to him. The contrast is too great. Why should he alone suffer from bad times?”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton

“I want a house that’s mobile but stationary, situated in a safe place without borders, where the people are peace-loving.”
― Andrei Codrescu, Wakefield

“When you earn your freedom, make decisions wisely in order to pursue economic and social success in the long run.”
― Saaif Alam

“In postcolonial Africa, single dwelling housing is the biggest perpetrator of urban segregation.”
― Archimedes Muzenda, Dystopia: How The Tyranny of Specialists Fragment African Cities

“Debates on housing policy have denigrated into shouting matches merely about ethics, values and rights. Polarised debates where socialism is regarded glorious and capitalism disastrous.”
― Archimedes Muzenda, Dystopia: How The Tyranny of Specialists Fragment African Cities

“On top of all that, there’s government. What does government have to do with it, you ask? Everything. Government is coach, referee, cheerleader, and fan in the game of housing.”
― Alex Avery

“Between 1934 and 1962 the U.S government handed out billions of dollars in home loans. But those weren't available to anyone black, a system eventually referred to as redlining, which would ensure that only whites could get out of poverty and find ways to wealth. In the U.S., that's what caused the development of ghettos. People of colour were not able to invest in housing that could then be passed on down through generations, forming the sort of wealth that many white people have.”
― Anita Arvast, What Killed Jane Creba: Rap, Race, and the Invention of a Gang War

“By turning houses into property, they have failed to fulfil their function as homes: whether it's in the aftermath of the financial crisis in the US, evicting families to protect the profits of banks, or the selling off of council houses in the UK. in short, housing has become just another way for the richest inn society to get even richer.”
― Ben Tippet, Split: Class Divides Uncovered

“In a large townhouse, a family is spread out across its rooms, each living in their own state but under one flag”
― Libby Page, The Lido

“Government's commitment to separating residential areas by race began nationwide following the violent suppression of Reconstruction after 1877. Although the Supreme Court in 1917 forbade the first wave of policies—racial segregation by zoning ordinance—the federal government began to recommend ways that cities could evade that ruling, not only in the southern and border states but across the country. In the 1920s a Harding administration committee promoted zoning ordinances that distinguished single-family from multifamily districts. Although government publications did not say it in as many words, committee members made little effort to hide that an important purpose was to prevent racial integration. Simultaneously, and through the 1920s and the Hoover administration, the government conducted a propaganda campaign directed at white middle-class families to persuade them to move out of apartments and into single-family dwellings. During the 1930s the Roosevelt administration created maps of every metropolitan area, divided into zones of foreclosure risk based in part on the race of their occupants. The administration then insured white homeowners' mortgages if they lived in all-white neighborhoods into which there was little danger of African Americans moving. After World War II the federal government went further and spurred the suburbanization of every metropolitan area by guaranteeing bank loans to mass-production builders who would create the all-white subdivisions that came to ring American cities.

In 1973, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concluded that the 'housing industry, aided and abetted by Government, must bear the primary responsibility for the legacy of segregated housing. . . . Government and private industry came together to create a system of residential segregation.”
― Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

“There must be a diversion of federal funds simultaneously to schools, housing, jobs, and health. We must eradicate our worst poverty--not the poverty in Harlem or Watts, but the poverty in men's imaginations. The middle classes who think that string, Scotch tape, and spit will get us out of our present dilemma must be convinced otherwise. Even compensatory education, isolated from adequate housing, decent living conditions, and good neighborhoods, is useless.

What is needed is something more far-reaching, more imaginative. We must begin by accepting the idea of a national plan to eradicate the ghetto. We must have national priorities and we must adjust the scale of our thinking to the scale of the problem.”
― Bayard Rustin, Down The Line

“We have got to provide meaningful work at decent wages for every employable citizen. We must guarantee an adequate income for those unable to work. We must build millions of low-income housing units, tear down the slums, and rebuild our cities. We need to build schools, hospitals, mass transit systems. We need to construct new, integrated towns. As President Johnson has said, we need to build a "second America" between now and the year 2000.

It is in the context of this national reconstruction that the socioeconomic fate of the Negro will be determined. Will we build into the second America new, more sophisticated forms of segregation and exploitation or will we create a genuine open, integrated, and democratic society? Will we have a more equitable distribution of economic resources and political power, or will we sow the seeds of more misery, unrest, and division?

Because of men like Martin Luther King, it is unlikely that the American Negro can ever again return to the old order. But it is up to us, the living, black and white, to realize Dr. King's dream.”
― Bayard Rustin, Down The Line

“At the time, the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration not only refused to insure mortgages for African Americans in designated white neighborhoods like Ladera; they also would not insure mortgages for whites in a neighborhood where African Americans were present. So once East Palo Alto was integrated, whites wanting to move into the area could no longer obtain government-insured mortgages. State-regulated insurance companies, like the Equitable Life Insurance Company and the Prudential Life Insurance Company, also declared that their policy was not to issue mortgages to whites in integrated neighborhoods. State insurance regulators had no objection to this stance. The Bank of America and other leading California banks had similar policies, also with the consent of federal banking regulators.”
― Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

“...Vito Marcantonio of New York, who argued on the the House floor that “you have no right to use housing against civil rights...Housing is advanced in the interest of the general welfare and in the interest of strength[en]ing democracy. When you separate civil rights from housing you weaken that general welfare.”
― Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

“How is it I'm begging you for housing,
when you burnt my building down?
You all ain't even playing fake-nice, like those
other murderers. You are all cut-eye and snarls,
all straight jargon, and nothing but the jargon.”
― Roger Robinson, A Portable Paradise

“What was atrocious was the fact that, like every other building in the new towns, they were dumped almost at random; the leakage of escaping gas scented the so-called gas-house districts, and not surprisingly these districts frequently became among the most degraded sections of the city. Towering above the town, polluting its air, the gas tanks symbolized the dominance of 'practical' interests over life-needs.”
― Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

“In both the old and the new quarters a pitch of foulness and filth was reached that the lowest serf's cottage scarcely achieved in medieval Europe. It is almost impossible to enumerate objectively the bare details of this housing without being suspected of perverse exaggeration. But those who speak glibly of urban improvements during this period, or of the alleged rise in the standards of living, fight shy of the actual facts: they generously impute to the town as a whole benefits which only the more favored middle-class minority enjoyed; and they read into the original conditions those improvements which three generations of active legislation and massive sanitary engineering have finally brought about.”
― Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

“We are motivated by radical love of country.
We fight for universal healthcare because of love.
We fight for a livable planet because of love.
We fight for equitable housing because of love.

(7/31/2020 on Twitter)”
― Ilhan Omar

“Stop saying "we can't afford" Homes for All, Green New Deal or Medicare for All. If we didn't spend trillions on endless wars and tax breaks for millionaires, we could afford to house our homeless, care for our seniors, and save our planet. We suffer from greed, not scarcity.

(7/29/2020 on Twitter)”
― Ilhan Omar

“It was hard to force people to give up their rights to apartments, and predictably, this radical Utopian ideal failed. But it does illustrate how the concept of social injustice in a communist society works: those who have are exceptions, and they should feel guilty and ashamed - the others are entitled to have, too, because it has been promised to them.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, Café Europa: Life After Communism

“When we say ‘housing for all’ and the government responds with ‘the homeless are
being temporarily housed in hotels to avoid the spread of the virus’, they are building a linguistic structure that defines the realm of the possible, that implicitly tells us to want less, to expect that total reconfiguration is out of the question. Like a poorly designed building, linguistic structures affect how we think, breathe, move and act. The mould sticks to our skin. We are familiar with a particular kind of linguistic structure: the preservation of a system of organisation that places capital before all else. This system ties our hands and feet together.”
― Lola Olufemi, Experiments in Imagining Otherwise

“When we say ‘housing for all’ and the government responds with ‘the homeless are being temporarily housed in hotels to avoid the spread of the virus’, they are building a linguistic structure that defines the realm of the possible, that implicitly tells us to want less, to expect that total reconfiguration is out of the question. Like a poorly designed building, linguistic structures affect how we think, breathe, move and act. The mould sticks to our skin. We are familiar with a particular kind of linguistic structure: the preservation of a system of organisation that places capital before all else. This system ties our hands and feet together.”
― Lola Olufemi, Experiments in Imagining Otherwise

“The end result is that the United States is today a more segregated country in many respects than it was twenty years ago. Problems of education, transportation to jobs and decent living conditions are all made difficult because housing is so rigidly segregated. The expansion of suburbia and migration from the South have worsened big-city segregation. The suburbs are white nooses around the black necks of the cities. Housing deteriorates in central cities; urban renewal has been Negro removal and has benefited big merchants and real estate interests; and suburbs expand with little regard for what happens to the rest of America.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

“To live and strive in modern America is to participate in a series of morally fraught systems. If a family’s entire financial livelihood depends on the value of its home, it’s not hard to understand why that family would oppose anything that could potentially lower its property values, like a proposal to develop an affordable housing complex in the neighborhood.”
― Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America